Date of Award

3-2010

Department/Program

Biomedical and General Engineering

Advisor

Lily Laiho

Abstract

Myocardial infarction is the leading cause of death in the western world. Time is critical when treating patients with myocardial infarction. The major problem is that many patients who are symptomatic wait too long before seeking medical attention, and some patients have no symptoms at all. In order to improve patient outcome there needs to be a better way to diagnose myocardial infarction. One solution is the continuous monitoring of the ST-Segment of the intrinsic ventricular beat morphology, called the QRS complex. There have been many studies that show that there are detectable shifts of the ST-Segment during coronary occlusion. These shifts can be detected by implanted cardiac leads, like those used with implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICD). The St. Jude Medical algorithm called ST Monitoring was designed to continuously monitor the ST-Segments and detect when there has been a significant shift. This thesis describes the implementation of the St. Jude Medical ST Monitoring algorithm on the St. Jude Medical Unity ICD platform. The process involved working on the requirements, design, implementation, and tests in order to verify the algorithm. The project was successfully completed and received FDA approval for an IDE study in the US and CE Marking in Europe. The data collected from the patients in the IDE will give confidence that the algorithm can successfully identify ST-Segment shifts that lead to myocardial infarction. If this is shown then the ST Monitoring algorithm can be used to reliably notify patients that they are having a significant cardiac event and need to seek medical attention immediately.

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